Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) by Bebergal Peter

Author:Bebergal, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2014-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

IV

At a U.S. Senate hearing in 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC)—a lobbying group made up of high-profile women in Washington whose members included Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore—met for the first time. Well-funded and even well-connected, the group was able to stir up outrage by focusing on a handful of songs they found particularly objectionable, including Prince’s Purple Rain song “Darling Nikki”—featuring a woman who is seen “masturbating with a magazine.” The group wanted a range of changes, including the lyrics of every song printed on album covers. While the emphasis was on sex and violence, of the fifteen songs the PMRC deemed the worst offenders, two were called out for explicit references to the occult. The song “Into the Coven” by the Danish heavy metal band Mercyful Fate describes an initiation into Lucifer’s coven (another example of musicians conflating witches with Satan worshippers), and “Possessed” by the proto–death metal band Venom is a graphic exhortation of the devil with all the right references—whores, priests, blood—to make a parent cringe.

The PMRC imagined a label system for albums with a letter alerting parents about the lyrical content: X (sex), V (violence), D/A (drugs and alcohol), and O (occult). The PMRC was not affiliated with any religious groups, and so the addition of “occult” as a category might appear to be an anomaly. But by 1985, the country was awash in stories, many of them recounted in court testimony, of what was called satanic ritual abuse. Stories unfolded, each one more horrific than the last, of children being sexually and physically abused and repressing the memories. Dramatic moments of hypnotic recall were evidence of satanic cults flourishing and using children for their debauched and evil purposes. The scare began with the 1980 publication of the book Michelle Remembers, a supposed transcript between a woman named Michelle Smith and her psychotherapist, Lawrence Pazder.

Smith recounts in sensational detail her abuses by a satanic cult her mother was a part of. Not only is the Church of Satan named as an organization older than Christianity, Smith details the appearance of the devil during a ritual, and even gets divine intervention from the Virgin Mary. The panic reached its peak during the trial of owners of a preschool who were accused by prosecutors of performing every manner of terrible abuse on their young charges. Hundreds of children acted as witnesses, and despite the outrageousness of the allegations, the public eagerly ate up the sordid details. While much of the “satanic panic” has since been debunked, the fact that so many Americans accepted the idea of a satanic conspiracy with agents everywhere was not unlike the Red Scare of the 1950s insofar as it was believed anyone could be a secret devil worshipper. If even our most trusted members of society, such as preschool teachers, bowed at the feet of the devil, then who could we trust?

Even law enforcement officials got into the game. In a 1989 report, “Satanic Beliefs, Criminal Actions,” written for

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